Security inspection systems are widely used in important places, such as airports, train stations, various venues, customs, ports and so on, to inspect people, bags, goods and containers, etc., so that prohibited goods or smuggled goods can be found before illegally passing. These security inspection systems typically comprise a scanning device for scanning inspected objects to generate images of the inspected objects and an image analysis workstation for analyzing the images. As the technical principles of the scanning devices are different, original scanned images generated by these scanning devices are different. These original scanned images (or preprocessed images which are obtained by pre-processing the original scanned images to eliminate individual differences among devices, which are collectively referred to as security inspection data hereinafter) are related to physical properties of the inspected objects and are often not suitable to be directly viewed by security inspection staff, and therefore the image analysis workstation needs to perform further image processing on the security inspection data to generate post-processed images suitable to be viewed by people and then the post-processed images may be used by the security inspection staff to perform image analysis. Further, the security inspection staff may use the image analysis workstation to perform a variety of image processing and operations on the security inspection data to analyze the inspected objects from different perspectives.
The security inspection systems are often deployed with a storage device or a storage server having a processor and a memory. A scanning device may directly transmit the security inspection data to the image analysis workstation for image processing or may also store the security inspection data on the storage device, and the security inspection data is obtained by the image analysis workstation from the storage device and then image processing and operations are performed by the security inspection staff on the security inspection data.
FIG. 1 illustrates architecture of a conventional system or operating on security inspection data. In this system, a remote device 110 selectively stores security inspection data after obtaining the security inspection data from a security inspection device and then transmits an image to a client 130 through a network 120. After receiving the security inspection data, the client 130 performs image processing as needed.
However, this solution has disadvantages, including at least the following examples:
1. the security inspection data is often in formats which are private to various manufacturers, and which lack a uniform standard. Therefore, it often needs to use image processing clients belonging to the various manufacturers for image processing and presentation, which results in poor universality of the clients, a high cost, and poor inconvenience;
2. security inspection data files are transmitted from the storage device to the client, which easily leads to leakage of image files, and is lack of security;
3. image processing algorithms are often the core technology of various security inspection manufacturers, and if the image processing algorithms are deployed on a client, there is a risk of secret leakage;
4. different security inspection devices (for example, ordinary X-ray machines and CT devices) generate image data which has a large difference in size, and have high requirements for network conditions in usage sites, for example, often require a 100 Mbit network or even a Gigabit network; and
5. some processing or rendering of the security inspection data has high requirements for client devices, and therefore it needs to configure a client device with high performance resulting in a high cost.